IBM to Take On Public Health Issues

By Jeffrey Burt |
Posted 2010-05-06

IBM is turning its massive computational
and data analysis capabilities to the health care field.

IBM officials on May 6
announced a project at their Almaden Research facilities to take public health
data that's already been collected to help government agencies, businesses and
health care providers develop strategies to better take on a host of medical
issues, starting with childhood obesity.

Right now, only basic connections can be made when dealing with
diseases like diabetes because, while massive amounts of data has been
gathered, the data hasn't been collected, integrated and analyzed to the extent
needed to develop comprehensive measures for combating the illnesses, according
to IBM officials.

"When we think about the factors that affect a person's health,
the biggest challenge of all is that there isn't just one factor, but it's a
collection of interacting factors," former IBM
executive Irving Wladawsky-Berger said in a video presentation about project
Splash.

Those factors encompass a host of areas, from finance and urban
planning to a person's eating and exercise habits, socio-economic status,
family life, where they live, clinical research and the media, according to IBM.

With this multiyear project, Big Blue's job is now to integrate
those factors together and help develop comprehensive programs to address the
issues.

"Lots of different organizations have models or ways of
understanding pieces of what is a very complex system," Paul Maglio, research
scientist at IBM Research, said in a video
presentation. "But nobody brings those different pieces together. That is what
the grand challenge is: How do we put all these things together into a single,
whole picture?"

That is what IBM is aiming
to do with the broad technology tools at its disposal.

"Nobody else in the world has the computational ability and
computational science that we have," Maglio said. "We're the only ones who can
actually bring all of these things together and integrate them and actually run
this in-house."

In the case of childhood obesity, the connection to processed
foods and lack of exercise has been made, according to IBM.
By analyzing all the data involved and running various simulations, the company
may be able to help government agencies and businesses decide whether offering
incentives to health food stores to relocate to town or to locate grocery
stores closer to bus stops may be worthwhile.

Another example from IBM
would be determining the impact of food labels on marketing plans, shopping
habits or the quality of school lunches.

"Our ability to advance the health of our population is
currently limited to maintaining healthy life choices and working within a
health care delivery system because it's been impossible to understand and to
quantify precisely how each factor in our environment plays a role,"
Martin Sepulveda, IBM fellow and vice
president for integrated health services at IBM,
said in a statement. "We hope the results of this project will help
individuals, governments and businesses actually understand exactly how the
actions they take affect health-and then work together to make better decisions
that make it easy to be healthy."